Interview: Kent Riboe from BSDEater.org

Not familiar with BSDEater? Well, you should be, as it's here for quite some time. But that's something you can read in interview! Enjoy!

Q:
Could you, please, shortly introduce yourself and
BSD Eater?

A:
BSD Eater was originally started as planet.openbsd.nu to
collect all news regarding the, at the time, BSD
flavours in one
place. It grew over the years to a user base of about
1000 readers
per day and was later relocated to its own domain
at www.bsdeater.org.
Openbsd.nu was mainly developed by me (Kent Riboe),
Olof Kasselstrand
and Maxim Bourmistrov with help from a bunch of good
people to make a
user-friendly site for Swedish OpenBSD users. It was
discontinued a couple of years ago due to some domain
problems (stuck
in provider-transfer) and bsdeater.org is
the only living part at this point and I’m the
caretaker.

As a CTO for a forex company, the security and stability means a
lot to us, which is why we have always been using OpenBSD
especially and in most cases run various BSD & Linux for our
platforms, because we trust the developers and the open source
community that drives progress forward.

Q:
How about you, how did you get involved with BSDs
and BSD community?

It
all started long ago in the cellar of my parents’
house, when I
found out from a friend that I could split my 128kbit
ISDN with my
neighbours. I started a company, hired my friend (Kristoffer Björk) to set up a
firewall for this and we created a local provider of
xDSL-, LAN- and
later WiFi- connections. Obviously we needed a squid
proxy for this
as well and setting all this up together, he had to
teach me a lot,
and he would be the reason why I got in to BSD. I
started with
OpenBSD and still devoted. (of course, the Obsd-songs
helps
during late night hacking as well - HUMPPA NEGALA!)

Llater
when we started www.openbsd.nu I
met the nice people over at netbsd.se via
IRC and had a lot of knowledge exchange from them
as well. We set up cvsup/cvsync/ntp/ftp/*-services at openbsd.nu and
that got us even closer to all the users out there
with questions,
suggestions and feedback. The
good thing about running a community is all the users
you gain
contact with. It’s been a long journey
and as for most of the BSD-users, we’ve only scratched
the surface
of what’s next to come.

During
the years I’ve run BSDeater, I’ve gotten in contact
with the
wonderful people of NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Darwin,
MidnightBSD,
DesktopBSD among others and lately ArchBSD, plus of
course all the
users, writers, commiters and sitekeepers out there.
It’s always
fun and exciting to get in touch with new passionate
people, and to
find new things out there, like your site discoverbsd.com.
It’s the people and the community that drives all of
us to continue
our journey.

At
this point I’ve run most flavors of BSD on my laptops
and all of
them have their own usage. Currently I am thinking of
trying the new
ArchBSD release (2013-12-25, imagine releasing on
xmas-day, that’s
devotion) and see what’s around that corner. Commits
have
been done to various projects, and bits are bits until
they become
bytes, which is what communities are about.

Q:
Yes, community is one of the things keeping BSD
going forward. How
long are maintaining BSD Eater project? What do you
think was the
biggest thing you learnt in process?

The
BSDeater project have been running for some years now,
but the
original planet.openbsd.nu was
started somewhere in the mid 2000 if I remember
correctly, which
makes it still quite young in the world of BSD. But
the plan is to
keep it going for many years ahead. Maybe
sometime later
on
it will be passed on
to another passionate individual to keep it rocking.

I
think the best thing learnt is "less is more". If you
can
remove something, remove it. Unnecessary things should
be avoided to
keep things clear and functional. Of
course every system has it's own purpose, use them
properly but at
the same time it's
important to
play and learn. :) One
of the big lessons
learnt is that it’s always okay
to ask for help. There’s always someone knowing more
than you. I
think that was proven when we made an SSH-bridge and
sent layer 2
info over it even though it should’ve been impossible
according to
devels. That
shows
that
software
is at best when it enables more than it was thought to
do
(this was done to use PA-assigned IPs for customers in
different
parts of the world coming out via Swedish IPs, today
this is a common
thing though).

Q:
So I guess your recommendation to BSD newbies is to
spend some time
on IRC?

In
one way yes, there’s always people that lets you
elaborate and
discuss openly there, almost always someone that had
the same issue
and can help you through it, and then later, you can
pass that
knowledge on yourself. A good example for that is the
NGINX chat on
freenode. A lot of new users come in with basic or
common problems,
get help and then stays in the channel and helps other
new users with
similar issues. The same happens for most
applications/packages and
you always have the trusty channels like openbsd,
netbsd, freebsd etc
on various networks. Find one that suits you and
things will work out
well. Just remember, if people are patient with you,
be patient with
others.

Earlier
there was a google.com/bsd that
was very helpful, bsd-oriented search, but that has
been removed.
Still
search engines are one of the best ways to find more
information,
usually solutions and help can be find in mail
archives like marc.
(marc.info)

Q:
You mentioned you run different BSDs for different
usage, can you
tell us more?

A:
Sure. I assume most people use different BSDs for
different usage,
like for instance OpenBSD for routers and firewalls,
FreeBSD for web
and fileservers and perhaps Darwin for desktop. In my
case it’s the
same, OpenBSD for network, FreeBSD or NetBSD for
applications (web,
etc) and then ArchBSD, Darwin or Dragonfly for
Desktop. In some cases
we also run Linux of course. An environment should
always be
standardized to keep cost and time to a minimum, but
diversity helps
stability in many cases since different systems are
good for
different purposes and depending on the
administrators’ level of
knowledge.

Q:
What are current sources for BSDEater? Where can
people find you if
they think you are missing some important source?

We
made a clean-up recently and removed some feeds that
were inactive
for a long period of time. If we miss or lack any feed
that could be
useful, we are happy to get a mail about it, simply
contact us:
bsdeater [at] riboe.se and
we’ll add it as soon as possible. I’ll add a
co-maintainer in the
next couple of days, hence the “we”.

In
the last
couple of months we added comments functionality,
because we want to
grow a bit as a community, to have more interaction.
Some badly
formatted feeds have made a problem for sites like
ours since they
provide only limited part of the article. Feeds like
that will be
removed because it’s a bad way of using rss. In my
honest opinion,
we always include a link to the full article, but
people shouldn’t
need to read first half on one site and then click it
to read the
following part somewhere else.